Critics cautious on voting rules

After a failed initial attempt July 22, Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer received a judge’s approval for new voter registration rules last Tuesday.
While many say the new rules are better for Minnesota voters than Kiffmeyer’s original proposal, critics say they are still concerned about larger issues.
The new rules are meant to bring Minnesota into alignment behind the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Imposed by Congress after the Florida vote-counting brouhaha of 2000, portions of that bill went into effect in January of this year, requiring citizens to submit additional identification documentation when registering to vote.

“The biggest problem for Minnesota in particular is that our system wasn’t really broken,” explained Javier Morillo-Alicea, the state coordinator for the AFL-CIO’s voting rights protection program. He says that while there are some positive aspects of the new HAVA mandates – voting machines for people with disabilities by 2006, for instance – the increased precautions may complicate an already underutilized process.

“We have a very voter-friendly state, which is why we’ve had historically high turnout; we have same-day registration, which is very voter-friendly,” he said. “What some of the new requirements do is make it more difficult for people to register, without getting anything concrete in return.”

Opponents have long accused Secretary Kiffmeyer of being overly partisan and critical of same-day voter registration.

The increased identification requirement is part of a larger HAVA mandate, compelling every state to create a uniform, statewide voter registration system. At this point, 43 other states have requested temporary exemptions from this requirement because they do not consider themselves prepared to change their systems so close to the highly contentious November election.

“The office, I think, is anxious to be at the forefront of states using the statewide voter registration system,” suggested Morillo-Alicea. “Because our Secretary of State did not request a waiver, we’re having to rush a lot of these changes in. What this means is that we’re very vulnerable to glitches happening.”

The system that’s being set up would also match voter registration files with Department of Public Safety (DPS) records, to ascertain that every eligible voter was counted for one vote. Such a structure requires a massive software undertaking that Morillo-Alicea claims wasn’t in place by the middle of July. “They’ve missed a series of their own deadlines,” he said. “It could lead to some really serious problems.”

Kiffmeyer contends that she felt comfortable instituting these changes so close to the election because Minnesota was one of the few states that already had a centralized, uniform voter registration system in place.

“That technology has been available in Minnesota starting in the middle of June,” she said last week. “The statewide voter registration system has been used in elections since then very successfully.”

Morillo-Alicea, on the other hand, counters that the system has undergone little real testing. “[Kiffmeyer] says that it worked well for the special election in senate district 39 – but that had something like 6 percent turnout. The master list used missed half of the registered voters – 20,000 people were missing from the master list.”

Under the Secretary of State’s original proposal, those 20,000 people would then be given the chance to same-day register – but if they did so and proceeded to vote, they would automatically forfeit their right to lodge an official HAVA complaint.

Kiffmeyer herself admits to some hesitancy about the timeframe in which she found herself working. At the request of the Senate, the MN Legislature asked the Secretary of State to write up new voter registration rules. Although a technical bill was already available, lawmakers instead insisted that Kiffmeyer’s office begin an expedited rule-making process.

“The lateness of the legislation being passed didn’t help because you have to wait for those last minute adjustments, in case Minnesota’s laws might be a little different,” Kiffmeyer complained. “I do not like to have to do that on such a short time-frame, because usually rules take a year to do.”

In this case, “expedited” meant that the Secretary’s office had about six weeks to revamp Minnesota’s voter registration rules into accordance with the new HAVA mandates.

Part of the reason that Administrative Law Judge George Beck ruled against Kiffmeyer’s first proposal June 22 had to do with the stringent matching system the Secretary was recommending. According to that first set of rules, the match between registration cards and DPS records needed to be 100 percent.

Donald McFarland, the Minnesota state director for America Votes, says that this was also one of his organization’s main concerns. “We have a large Hmong community here in Minnesota,” McFarland cautioned, “and the spelling of their names is sometimes very different from the English names. They could be transposed, for instance, by the Secretary of State’s office itself as they enter it. Clearly if a name was spelled wrong, that shouldn’t be a reason why we deny and disenfranchise voters.”

Because of Minnesota’s unique same-day registration system, voters who found themselves unable to utilize their early registration would still be able to register at their polling place. McFarland worries that the long lines and wait times would have discouraged potential voters, however.

“It would have been an effort to disenfranchise voters and I think it would have taken place in communities of color – such as the Hmong community, the Latino community, the African immigrant community. And these are the communities that we need to do a lot of work to get them involved with democracy and the political process.”

Part of that attempt would include issuing voter registration documents that are clear and readily understandable to a broad cross-section of the public. Citing Kiffmeyer’s new registration cards as too confusing, both Ramsey and Hennepin counties have asked to use their own alternate forms.

Morillo-Alicea says that, as someone who teaches others to run voter registration drives, he has a firsthand understanding of this confusion. “Our trainers, when we first hand (the new forms) out, there’s always things that they fill out wrong on the cards.”

The Secretary of State, however, has consistently denied the counties’ appeals, citing the proximity of the election. “For that, she says an election year is not the time to do this,” groaned Morillo-Alicea. “But on the other hand, in an election year, she has insisted on implementing a brand-new, untested software system.”

In Beck’s first decision, he ruled that Kiffmeyer did not in fact have the authority to unilaterally reject these various voter registration forms.

Now that the court’s second ruling has approved Kiffmeyer’s revised proposal, McFarland says that significant control has been handed back to country election officials, should a hitch in the technology occur.

“We’ll see very few changes on election day. I believe that what the judge said was, ‘if you can clearly decide that this voter is this person, then that person has the right to vote,’” McFarland said. “If this case hadn’t happened, Minnesota could have turned into the Florida of 2000.”